Trying on Swimsuits Really Is the Worst, Study Shows

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If trying on a bikini under unflattering dressing room lights has
ever soured your mood, rest assured you're not alone. A new study
finds that, for women, even just imagining trying on swimsuits
can increase a bad mood.

Imagining wearing a swimsuit also increases feelings of
self-objectification, a term used by psychologists to describe
how people, often women and girls, take an outsider's view of
their bodies, reducing themselves to objects to be evaluated.

" Self-objectification
has a variety of negative consequences ?— always worrying about
how you look, shame about the body, and [it] is linked to eating
disorders and depression," study researcher Marika Tiggemann, a
psychologist at Flinders University in Australia, wrote in an
email to LiveScience.

Self-objectification is a personality trait, meaning that some
women are more likely to objectify themselves in general than
others. But certain situations can also increase feelings of
self-objectification, no matter what your starting point.
Tiggemann and her colleagues wanted to know what sort of
differences clothing made.

"We wear and choose clothes every day," Tiggemann said. "Clothes
are controllable aspects of our appearance, in a way that body
size and shape are not." [ 5
Myths About Women's Bodies ]

She and her colleagues wrote four scenarios to test the impact of
clothing on self-objectification: In one, women were asked to
imagine themselves trying on a swimsuit in a dressing room. In
another, they imagined wearing a swimsuit while
walking down a beach. The other two scenarios had the same
settings, but instead of a swimsuit, the women were asked to
imagine wearing jeans and a sweater.

One hundred and two female undergraduates read each of these
scenarios in random order and participated in the imagination
exercise. After each scenario, they filled out questionnaires
designed to measure mood, feelings about the body and
self-objectification.

Unsurprisingly, imagining wearing a swimsuit made women feel
worse about their bodies than did the jeans outfit. Somewhat more
surprisingly, it was imagining wearing a swimsuit in a dressing
room that made women most likely to self-objectify — not the
public scenario in which they might assume other people would
judge
their bodies. That result emphasizes how much
self-objectification is truly an internal process, Tiggemann and
her colleagues reported in May in the journal Sex Roles.

"The physical presence of observers is clearly not necessary,"
they wrote. "More particularly, the dressing room of a clothing
store contains a number of potentially objectifying features:
(often several) mirrors, bright lighting, and the virtual demand
that women engage in close evaluation of their body in evaluating
how the clothes appear and fit."

Harmful self-objectification is not easy to prevent, Tiggemann
said. Her advice: Avoid mirrors and comparisons with others, and
focus on activities that emphasize the function, not the
appearance, of the body, such as yoga, sports or sailing.